Privacy notice

Chelmsfordfire is responsible, as the controller, for what becomes of any personal information you give us through this site. We don't hold a separate registration number worth quoting here. If you want to ask us anything about this notice, the quickest route is through our contact page.

Filling in our enquiry form means telling us your name, an email address, a phone number, and either your postcode or your full address, along with a description of the fire risk you're facing. The form also lets you attach photographs showing the problem itself. Please do not send photographs that show people. If one does, we delete the photograph. That form runs on technology supplied by Basin (usebasin.com), not by us directly. Anything you send afterwards, by reply or follow up, joins the same record. Separately, the network that delivers this website to your screen keeps its own technical logs of the visit.

To answer your enquiry and pass it to one specialist covering your area, which is what you ask us to do when you send it. Our legitimate interest is in answering the people who contact us and in running the enquiry service, for which the specialist pays us. We have assessed that this does not override your interests, because you have asked us to pass your enquiry on and you can take your enquiry elsewhere at any time. We also keep a record of what was said, so there's a clear account if a query comes up later, and the same information helps us keep this site working safely. Where the law itself requires us to act on something you've told us, we do. Your enquiry, with the details you gave, is passed to one specialist firm covering the area you told us about, so that they can contact you about it. They use it only to answer your enquiry and to arrange any visit or work you agree with them, and from that point they are responsible for how they handle it. We do not pass your details to anyone else for their own use. Nothing you send here feeds marketing lists, profiling, or automated decisions, and we don't sell it to anyone.

An enquiry rarely stays in our hands alone; parts of what you send are handled by other organisations working on our behalf. Basin delivers the enquiry form; Bunny serves the pages; Namecheap provides our email; and Google supplies the typefaces the pages are set in, so your browser requests those files from Google. Each of them handles it only to do that job for us. We would also give information to a regulator, the police or a court where the law required it, and to nobody else.

Depending on where our hosting happens to route things, information you give us can end up outside the country you're sitting in. The network that serves the pages holds its technical logs in the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States. The form service operates from the United States and is certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

We keep an enquiry for twelve months from the last contact about it, so that we can answer a later question about what was said and who it went to. After that it is deleted from the form service and from our email, and any backup copy is overwritten on the provider's normal cycle. You can ask us to delete it sooner at any time. The network that serves the pages keeps its technical logs for no more than 3 days.

Everything you send through this site travels over an encrypted connection, the padlock you'd expect from any site asking for personal details. Once it arrives, only the people who need to deal with your enquiry can see it.

You have the right to ask what personal information we hold about you and to receive a copy; to have it corrected; to have it deleted; to restrict how we use it; to object to our using it; and to receive what you gave us in a form you can take elsewhere. Ask through the contact page and we answer within one month, without charge; we may ask you to confirm who you are. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113, though we would rather you told us first. If you complain to us about how we have handled your personal information, we acknowledge it within 30 days and reply as soon as we can.

This site is aimed squarely at adults dealing with a fire risk problem on a property, not at children. If we discover that someone under eighteen has sent us an enquiry, we'll delete what they sent rather than act on it.

We haven't built this site to set cookies, run analytics, or serve advertising of any kind. Nothing here watches what you do after you leave.

We're free to alter this notice if the way we handle information changes. Whatever text appears on this page at the time you read it is the version that applies.